I love learning how to make neat little gadgets from the kids at site. This month, all the kids were making small ‘fog horns’ out of just a water bottle, an aluminum can, and a balloon. It was really interesting how they put it all together so simply, and the sound is deafening! The sound moves like a wave through the village, one kid will blast his horn from one end of the village, then other kids will blast theirs in response, until you hear a roar of honking both near and distant through the village!
Borah making a foghorn
Rong making a foghorn
The man, fellow PCV, Mr. Gianni himself, came an incredible distance from the far South of Cambodia to visit my site for the second time! We scarfed down some of mom’s home cooking before a neighbor invited us to go for a van ride in order to check out a pagoda.
Pagoda exploring
The newly dug pond behind the pagoda
Of course we agreed, and climbing aboard the van, I was delighted to see a retired doctor from my health center was also along for the ride!
Gianni and the retired doctor from my health center
The ride was about an hour away down dirt roads. The air conditioning was broken and we had to keep the windows closed because the dirt roads were so dusty. It was HOT inside that van jam packed with 15 some people!
Gianni and I on the van ride
We were happy to arrive and walk around checking out the buildings. We spoke with a man who operated a small carnival ride, he was 26 years old and already a father of four children. He married when he was 15 and his wife was 13 and they had their first child that same year, that daughter is now 11 years old.
Brand name loyalty!
The next day we went to the health center. The week before a plan was set to extend the fence around the health center to include some new land that was donated from the community. All the village health volunteers were invited, all the village chiefs, the community government, locals…it was going to be a full on community mobilization and strengthening activity! Unfortunately, only about six of us showed up and the fence posts were really deep and the dirt is as hard as cement, so we all spent 30 minutes digging our just one of the many many posts before deciding the scrap the effort and try again during the rainy season. Oh well!
Digging out the old fence posts
Resting at the health center
In the afternoon, Gianni and I walked out to a huge pond where the owner was pumping it dry and lots of people were trolling through the mud picking out the fish. To make the job easier, one man carried two metal poles hooked up to a car battery and lightly electrocuted the fish to stun them, then they were very easy to pick up and put into buckets and baskets! For the last year, I always regretted not getting into the knee deep mud my first year to help out, so this year I made sure to get in and play!
Catching fish in the pond, can you find me?
We washed off in a nearby flooded rice field, then the owner’s family gave me a plastic bag of small fish to take home to my host mother! One of the villagers was heading home at the same time as us and had a trailer behind his moto, so he let us jump in for a fun ride back to the house. In the evening we walked down to a neighbors house where they have a beautiful volleyball court set up and watched two teams from local villages battle it out on the main court in front of a crowd of some 20+ people!
Looking at the big fish from the pond
During Gianni’s visit, I discovered that he recently stopped sleeping with a pillow. I was blown away by the idea, I don’t think I’ve ever considered the notion that sleeping without a pillow would be an option and yet one more thing we can eliminate from our cluttered lives! I’ve tried it for about a month now. I sleep just as soundly, but it feels like I have so much freedom, that the entire bed is a fresh canvas that can be slept on as I please!
Way up in the rafters of our house, under one of the peaks of the roof there hangs a maroon cloth. For two years I’ve wondered about it and how it go there and what it was for. One of the villagers finally educated me! The cloth contains a spirit that protects the house from catching fire and burning.
At the health center with two of the village health volunteers
Sitting with my mother and sister late one night, my host mom told me about her two miscarriages. One was before my sister, she carried it about 3.5 months then had a miscarriage because she was riding her bike long distances everyday to buy and then resell wicker baskets around the commune. The second was after my brother was born and she carried the baby a full 8+ months before slipping during some household chores. Terrible circumstances to hear about and crazy to think that I could have had two more host siblings.
Ever Sunday I give out gifts to the cousins and village kids, thanks to generous care packages from all of you back home! The rule is, if you don’t go to school, you don’t get gifts and you can’t watch movies at night. The rule doesn’t have much effect on little Tee, he just refuses to go to 1st grade for no reason at all. I tried to make a deal with him, he couldn’t have a gift this Sunday, but if he went to school the next day, Monday, then he could have a gift then. His brother, Borah, laughed in his face and told me that he hasn’t been going to school for so long that the teacher erased his name from the student list and he will have to retake 1st grade the following year.
Sunday gift distribution
I was standing under my house with some kids. A small girl I didn’t know, maybe 11 years old came up to me from behind my house. She handed me a freshly cut palm fruit and said, “From Sopin.” She pointed across a rice field and then ran away. I looked in the direction of her point to see one of my English students far away, standing with her mother and waving her arms wildly above her head. Thanks Sopin for the delicious fruit!
Heeing, one of my older cousins, studies at the high school in Puok. Word got out that he has been going to the school, but not attending the classes. Instead, he wanders around behind the school with some other students and has one of his friends sign his name onto the attendance sheet. Uncle Hooah chewed him out good for it and told him that if he doesn’t want to study, he should drop out, get a job and take care of himself. Heeing was contrite, but rumor has it he is still doing the same.
On Sopeeahlie’s birthday (my host niece) I biked into Siem Reap between English classes and bought two birthday cakes. One was for Sopeeahlie’s first birthday and the second was for my host mom’s birthday only one day before. When I got back to the house after class, I surprised both mom and sister with the cakes, and they survived the one hour bicycle ride in the heat very well!
I gave out over 100 balloons to the kids that night, blew them up with my bicycle pump, and let them decorate as they saw fit.
Blowing up balloons with the bicycle pump
Some decorated the house, some made festive hats, other made animals and taped them to the stairwell!
When everyone had gathered around 8:00, we lit the candles and sang “Happy Birthday” in English. Following that was a cake eating frenzy and some of the kids got into an icing battle rubbing it on each others faces! I’ve had the idea for that party in mind since we celebrated my birthday back in August the previous year. It was a delight to see it come into reality and to share some American culture with family and friends who mean so much to me.
Whin, a village student with strong English skills, sometimes come to my house to practice English after we watch a movie. On a recent night, after all the other kids had left, he opened his bag and gave me a long sleeve athletic shirt with a matching pair of athletic shorts, they were red and black after the colors of a German soccer club. After thanking him, I asked him why he bought them for me. He replied, “No reason, we’ve just known each other for two years now.”
I am the proud recipient of two care packages from two marvelous human being in my life. Kathy, my soul sister and fearless race leader, and from Nanny, my unconditionally loving and supportive grandmother! Nanny sent taffy, magazines, tootsie rolls, beef jerky, candy jewelry, and a huge batch of homemade cinnamon cookies! I stuffed my face with the goodies for days on end, shared some with the kids and fellow PCV’s and it was like being a kid on Halloween night!
Kathy sent me a bag of candy, Easter egg dye, a marvelously written letter, and the cream of the crop…a new Adventure Racing Maryland (ARMD) race jersey! I’ve secretly wanted one so badly since the day they were created and I drooled over the pictures of my friends racing in them and looking so good! Thank you, thank you, thank you, I owe you both!
During some down time, I was laying in a hammock under the house and reading a book. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw some flames in the spot where we light a fire at night in order to keep the mosquitoes off of the cows. But it seemed odd, because the cows were out to pasture, there weren’t flames there before, and I hadn’t seen anyone walking around there that could have lit the fire. When I investigated further, a pair of my boxers had blown off of the bamboo pole that they were drying on, landed on the coals from the night before and caught fire! What an odd fate for a pair of boxers I was gifted by an ex-girlfriend many years ago!
Sister let me help out with some cooking for dinner one night. I was given a chopping clever and a cutting block. She dished out some “brahawk”, fermented fish paste, and I got to chopping it up into a paste. As I chopped she slowly added in further ingredients: chili peppers, garlic, lemon grass, MSG, sugar, peanuts, and tree ants! When it was all chopped up in a cohesive mass, we dipped it onto assorted vegetables for dinner…salty, sour, crunchy, crispy, delicious!
A different night’s dinner provided some unique eats. My brother had caught a large snake and mom cooked up some snake soup. The night before, after a hard rain, Borah and my sister had gathered up lots of toads and this night we ate them whole over the grill!
In part of the continual effort of being a homeowner, my host parents are constantly moving things around to further improve the house. This day we were taking down the large awning that my father and brother-in-law had erected just months before. Mom wanted to use the roofing panels to help shelter our new kitchen area behind the food stall. Thanks to my height, dad recruited me to stand on some chairs and tie the tip of the panels with some old hammock straps. But only two days later we took it down to move it somewhere else again!
One of the neighbors bought an entire truck load of small watermelons for $250 and was selling them out of his house. I don’t know how they made out on the venture, but there was lots of delicious watermelon around and the owners children brought me one or two everyday as gifts!
On a holiday, my advanced students asked to study for two hours since they had extra free time. I worked up some review games for them, and borrowed the most exciting one from the Khmer teachers I had way back in training two years ago. I blew up balloons with small slips of paper in them containing words in English. In a relay race, the kids had to take a balloon, run down to a chair, sit on the balloon until it popped, grab the slip of paper, run back and translate the word before the next person could run! We were in hysterics between the laughing and the running. Now that’s what I call fun!
Visiting one of my favorite grandmothers in a different village, I was sad to discover that she had a very sore back and legs and it was difficult for her to walk. This also put her wonderful gardening efforts to a halt since she couldn’t water for care for the plants. A doctor came over on a moto and shot her with a syringe directly into the butt cheek for $5.00. Another villager mentioned that it is difficult for her to be at the house all day since she’s very active, social, and enjoys being out in the community. Here’s to her speedy recovery!
In a small trick I once learned from my American father, I sometime have the little cousins bend over and put their arms through their legs. Then I grab their hands from behind, and when you lift them up, the kids unfurl into a front flip before you gently set them back down! All goes well because I’m tall and strong in comparison to the small cousins. The problem was the one time, one of the little female cousins attempted to be the lifter for one of the other small cousins. They are about equal height and strength, so you can see how this isn’t going to be plausible. She muscled up, yanked his arms and poor little Ga’dee proceeded forward and crunched his head into the hard dirt with no hands available to protect his fall. He must have seen stars by the look in his eyes, but was back up running around in no time. The other cousins and I who witnessed it were telling the story for days to come!
I contracted a fever for a day or two. I spent the hot day alternately laying on a table and laying in a hammock reading and sleeping, only getting up to run to the bathroom. I had diarrhea 10+ times that day and night and didn’t make it to either of my English classes. In the afternoon, I walked to the health center and they issued me some re-hydration salts to mix into my drinking water. K’neat rode over to the health center while I was there to check on me and see if I needed anything. It seemed like as good of a time as ever to try out some traditional Khmer medicine! I asked my mom is she would “cup” me that night. Despite what you may be thinking, ‘cupping’ is not the Khmer variation of ‘spooning’, but rather using glass cups and a torch to create a vacuum on one’s skin in order to break the small capillaries and release the “bad air” in our bodies.
Cupping
My brother-in-law did the duties. He quickly inserted the torch into the cup to make it hot remove the air, then place the mouth of the cup against my back.
After about 20 cups were on, we waited about 20 minutes before removing them and performing the process two more times until my entire back was covered. While we were letting the cups do their work, I had the kids get out my computer and we put on a movie. I was laying right in the middle of the floor where we watch, so they all sat around me. When Hei came into the house, he knocked over the cup holding the oil for the torch and cleaned it up with a dirty rag in the basket where the cups were stored. When my brother lit up the torch for the second round of cupping, he shook up the excess flaming oil so it would not drip on my back, however these flaming drips quickly ignited the oily rag and the wicker basket that housed the cups just inches away from me! My brother-in-law quickly sprang up and threw the basket across the house, then kicked it down the stairwell out into the yard where it could burn itself out on the dirt! After the excitement died down, we got back to business cupping. Uncle Hooah came over and upon seeing that I was sick instructed the kids to squeeze my arms and legs to speed the healing process. So in one of the most fascinating moments of my life, I laid on the floor with glass cups suctioned to my back, some ten kids simultaneously massaging my arms and legs and the other kids fanning me with cardboard scraps. I appreciated ever second of their care and the next day I was considerably better and within two days I was back to normal!
The aftermath
Joely the Goalie 